On the night of March 7-8, it struck four oil facilities in and around , as part of wider attacks on more than 30 energy infrastructures in .
Thick black, toxic fumes blanketed the city, while soot and pollutants returned to the ground as “black rain”, also flowing into drainage systems, with fears of surface and groundwater pollution in a metropolis of more than nine million people. A few days later, the ecological damage of the war appeared thousands of kilometers away from the main field of conflict, near the coast of Sri Lanka.
The torpedoing of the Iranian frigate Dena by US forces caused an oil spill 20 kilometers long, threatening ecologically sensitive coastal zones, with local Sri Lankan authorities already beginning sampling and clean-up operations.
These are just two of more than 300 critical environmental incidents that he recorded, within the first 11 days of the war, in 12 countries of the wider region, the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a non-governmental organization based in the United Kingdom, with 232 of them already assessed for their environmental risk. According to the same data, the most frequent targets were military infrastructure, while at least 12 commercial ships had been hit in ports or in the Persian Gulf as of March 11, where at the beginning of the American operation “Epic Fury” about 150 tankers with crude oil and LNG were anchored.
Tons of carbon dioxide
In just the first two weeks since it began, the war produced more than 5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), an amount exceeding the corresponding average annual emissions of Iceland.
This is demonstrated by recent analysis by the progressive American climate and economic think tank Climate and Community Institute.
Almost 50% of CO emissions2e came from the damaged houses, buildings and infrastructure, while almost 1.8 million tons of CO2e were attributed to fuel burned in oil tanks, facilities and tankers.
Speaking to “Vima” o Patrick Biggerexecutive director of the Climate and Community Institute and lead author of the analysis, characterized the conflicts in the Middle East as “key point of intersection between geopolitics and geoeconomics». As he points out, “unprovoked military attacks targeting energy infrastructure are absolutely a form of climate destabilization».
Ukraine’s precedent is revealing. According to Mr. Bigger, the Russian attacks created a huge windfall for US fossil fuel companies by expanding the LNG market. These gains, he states in “Step,” “they are channeled back into new mining and new production around the world».
In theory, he adds, Europe should have already understood that “energy security can only be ensured by major investments in renewable energy sources». However, he warns that “not all countries will learn this lesson and certainly not the current US administration” which, in his estimation, will use high prices as a pretext to further expand fossil fuel production, thus leading to even greater climate destabilization.
The timeless question
A perennial issue remains not only the size of environmentally harmful emissions from war conflicts, but also the fact that these remain institutionally under-registered. As Mr. Bigger points out, “military emissions have been deliberately excluded from the accounting methodologies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change since the 1990s”while even today “there is no generally accepted methodology for valuing wartime emissions.”
This means that the actual climate footprint of conflicts is often calculated retrospectively by independent researchers rather than by a coherent international accountability system. For him, more data is only useful if it leads to meaningful results: “Recording would only make sense if the purpose was to assign responsibility for ecocide and climate damage caused by wars of aggression.” The debate, therefore, is not only about the scientific measurement of the war, but also whether its environmental damage will ever acquire real legal and diplomatic weight.
At this point her intervention Theodotas Nantsouhead of environmental policy at WWF Greece, gives the issue its purest political dimension. Speaking to “Vima”, he talks about “a human tragedy, but also an ecological disaster of global proportions, with consequences that will last longer than the conflict itself”while it characterizes the bombing of fossil fuel facilities “environmental crime”.
Its observation gains more weight if seen next to Ukraine. Three years of war have already been linked to around 237 million tonnes of CO₂e, an amount comparable to the annual emissions of Belgium, Ireland and Austria combined, and an estimated social cost of around $43 billion. For Ms Natsu, the two wars in Europe’s neighborhood demonstrate that dependence on hydrocarbons is at once a source of conflict, instability, geopolitical dependency as well as environmental destruction. “Weaning off fossil fuels”emphasizes, “it is a recipe for peace, but also an imperative for stability, energy security and environmental protection”.
